Read:

What was the vision behind Darktrace and how did it come about?

Well it actually goes back quite a long way. I was on the board of the BBC and I was pretty much the only technical qualified board member. And they had a little bit of a problem - what was happening was the various celebrities’ salaries were appearing in the newspapers and tabloids. And so, I was asked to look at you know how this information was getting out. And at the time, people thought about cybersecurity as being about having a war and you have a big strong wall to keep the bad guys out. And what became apparent from my BBC problem was that the problem wasn't the people on the outside, it was some people on the inside. Whether they were nefarious or just gullible and being misled by people, that's how the information was getting out. And that lesson was a very practical one and made it clear to me that you have to assume that the threat is already in there. On the inside - the insiders.

And another way of looking at this – I was on holiday in Italy in Tuscany with beautiful hill towns, and they all have a wall around them with gates. But the reason they're beautiful is that they really stopped developing in the 1600s. And then you go back to modern Milan which is the most vibrant city, the walls are still there but they’ve knocked holes through them – put freeways through them and everything. It's a very important analogy for what's going on. If you want to be successful in the digital world, what you have to do is be interconnected, you have to have people coming in and out all the time and you can't control who's in. If it was a castle you’d open the gates every morning and everyone comes in. So, the model, which is very different is that you think about the threat is already in. How do you deal with it? And that was really what led to the idea of Darktrace.

And then when we looked at the technology and the AI to see if that was possible to make it and Jack Stockdale, who’s now the CTO of Darktrace, came in and did work on that idea. And of course, the interesting thing about it is that my background is a very strange one in that I did at Cambridge both advanced physics and biochemistry as part of the system they have. And so, I looked at this and I thought well this is immune system. They're talking about something which is inside and is looking for things it's never seen before doing things they shouldn't. And that was a positioning which has obviously led to Darktrace, so I explained that to everyone. The people from the intelligence world immediately understood this - they were dealing with the operational problems, a bit like my BBC one as well. And so that's really how the Darktrace idea was born and of course it's turned out to be incredibly successful.